Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.

Quiet people have the loudest minds.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

The water was glassy and calm, still candy-colored in the afterglow of sunset.

A life without love is like a tree without fruit.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.

Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.

You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there... and still on your feet.

When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and thats very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

…He was always high on drugs. I was not a drug man, but in case I wanted to hide from myself for a few days, I knew I could get anything I wanted from him.

President Bush announced that the war in Iraq has been won. It's all over, it's been won. I believe this would be Bush's first uncontested victory.

We are all so privileged to be citizens of America, and we all need to be engaged.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

Any of the decisions that I made, if one could actually locate a shape or form, were all within a wall, the landscape of music.

I have people come onstage and ask me questions and I get to meet them. That's one of the reasons I like it. When you're performing, when you're doing your movies, they're not there with you.

Faith does not ask for possible things; it demands impossible.